A Beast By Any Other Name

So… way back before Upton Sinclair‘s groundbreaking book “The Jungle“ exposed the heinous practices of America’s food industry and inspired the creation of the FDA, those companies used to feed the American public rotten beef, diseased poultry, dog-feces, blood-soaked sawdust and rat meat. Because when it comes to making more money or behaving decently and humanely toward the customer, “more money” usually wins out. UNLESS the public health is defended by the law, enforced by men with guns.

That’s NOT a controversial statement—it’s just history. Don’t believe me? Look it up.

Why are we surprised that now, 100 years later, halfway through the second decade of the 21st century, that those laws have been bent, re-interpreted, re-written, fudged, skirted and bribed away to the point where at this moment almost every bit of the processed food consumed by Americans has been squeezed, padded, reconstituted, reworked, chemically adjusted, sugar-enhanced, and artificially-flavored, until it contains the absolute LEAST amount of nutritive value allowed by law and formulated so that it can be produced in mass as cheaply as possibly, and there’s almost no way to eat it for any length of time without screwing up one’s glycemic index, depressing one’s immune system, and packing one’s body with pounds and pounds of stored fat.

In the terrible reality of today’s supermarket, the CHEAPER that any processed food is, the more damaging it is to one’s body. Sadly, that sick equation dooms the very poorest and most helpless in our society to the very worst health.

More amazing still is the fact that— as long as it’s all packed with an obscene amount of processed sugar and enough addictive, enticing flavor-enhancing chemicals carefully-designed by food chemists to fool our taste buds, most Americans don’t seem to have a problem with it. Those who do, often fall prey to the “health food” industry, which in many cases has been co-opted by the big food companies, who sell candy bars labeled as “health bars” and sugary soda pop labeled as “health drinks.”

Ever try to buy something to drink, in a convenience store, with zero sugar— that ISN’T just salty, chemical-laced “diet” soda, or plain bottled water? Try it some time.

Try buying ANYTHING in a convenience store that has no sugar or chemical sweetener in it. But remember— there’s sugar in the ketchup, too. And all the condiments. And all the bread, and all the chips, and all the buns. Sugar, and not much else.

If we are what we eat, then we are a nation of garbage, growing ever fatter while slowly starving to death on the cheap, machine-produced chemical plasti-food that we allow our corporations to feed to us.